Is It Remotely Plausible That Kim Jong-un Had His Uncle Eaten By 120 Dogs?

The big news out of North Korea today is that,
according to the Strait Times, Kim Jong-un fed his uncle to
120 hungry dogs after he was purged from the North
Korean leadership.

According to the report, Jang Song-taek was stripped naked and
thrown into a cage
with his aides, then dogs that had been starved for three days
were set on them. The whole execution process apparently took
around an hour, during which Kim and 300 other officials
watched.

It's an incredible twist
to the already incredible story of Jang, once
one of the most powerful men in North Korea before he was purged
and executed at the tail end of last year. But you have to wonder
— could it possibly be true?

To start with, there are many strange aspects to the report. For
example, while the Strait Times article has made headlines over
the world today, it was actually first published on December 24.
Then, while the Singaporean newspaper is a fairly well-respected
newspaper in itself, the actual reporting for this story it cites
a December 12
article in Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong-based newspaper
supportive of the Chinese government. In studies of the different
credibility ratings of Hong Kong newspapers,
Wen Wei Po consistently ranks near the bottom of the tables.

Over
at NK News, Chad O'Carroll has spoken to a number of North
Korea experts about the report and its trustworthiness. The
results are decidedly mixed, though one expert, Honorary Senior
Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at the University
of Leeds Aidan Foster-Carter, points out that North Korea
has released a number of videos of effigies of South Korean
officials being ravaged by dogs — so, there may be a kernel of
truth to the method at least, though you have to wonder how
practical execution of a live human by dog really is.

Thus, many experts view the more absurd stories that come out of
North Korea with trepidation. Last year, when there were rumors
that Kim may have had his ex-girlfriend (or rather, rumored
ex-girlfriend) executed,
many North Korea watchers expressed disbelief. "I don't trust
these sources," says Steven Herman, formerly Voice of America's Korea
correspondent, told Business Insider at the time. "Even
mainstream media in South Korea has repeatedly been wrong on
these sensationalistic stories originating from the North."

Others pointed to the fact that the girlfriend execution story,
and others like it (such as the execution of an army
minister by "mortar round" story from earlier in 2013) appear
to have originated from the South Korean intelligence services,
an obviously biased and not always trustworthy source.

That said, it'd be wrong to discount this story completely. Many
foreign observers expressed doubt when rumors of Jang's purge and
trial began to circulate and were surprised when the North Korean
state news agency published a story not only confirming the purge
and adding that Jang had been executed. There are also the widely
accepted stories of the horrors
from the North Korean prison camp system, some of which are
just as horrific and brutal as the story of Jang's execution.

Ultimately, North Korea is a strange place — and sometimes truth
is stranger than fiction.